David bar Paulos

David bar Paulos [Dawid bar Pawlos] (8th/9th century–Syrian Orthodox), born in Beth Shahaq, in the region of Nineveh, was cloistered in the monastery of Mor Sargis on the Dry Mountain in Sinjar. There he would later become the abbot.1 He left the monastery with his student, Zechariah, and 40 other monks as a result of a disagreement with the eastern bishop Yoḥannan. They evidently traveled to the Monastery of Qenneshre only to return 20 months later. Upon his return he brought back a previously unknown book of 170 hymns (ܡܥܢܝ̈ܬܐ) attributed to Severus of Antioch which he incorporated into the liturgy of the Syrian Orthodox Church around 785/6.2 A collection of his letters have been preserved (see Dolabani below) as well as a dialog between a Jacobite and a Melkite about the Trisagion (see Assemani below), a theological fragment about the Devil, and an enumeration of Aristotle's categories. He is also the author of two major mēmrē on the seven climates of the earth and on the variations of the duration of day and night. He authored a work on trees and plants and their symbolism, some short grammatical works, a poem on the alphabet, and a commentary on Genesis 10. The partially anonymous cycle of 22 poems about the life of wisdom attributed to him are likely not his own, but rather derive sometime after the 13th century.3